1. Field of the Invention
The entire contents of Japanese Patent Application No. 2000-207714 filed on Jul. 10, 2000 are incorporated herein by reference.
The present invention relates to an automatic translator and more particularly to an automatic translator that performs translation of a predetermined typical sentence by searching a table that stores a translated sentence corresponding to the typical sentence. The present invention also relates to a computer-readable storage medium having an automatic translation program recorded thereon.
2. Description of the Related Art
The conventional automatic translator uniformly provides analytical processing to the entirety of an original to be translated. FIG. 1 is a block diagram illustrating a configuration of a conventional typical automatic translator. As illustrated in the figure, in conventional, the entirety of the original is sequentially inputted to an original inputting section 31, and the inputted original is divided into morphemes by a morphological analyzer 32. Thereafter, a sequence of morphemes is subjected to analytical processing by a syntactic analyzer 33, a semantic analyzer 34, and a conceptual structure converter 35 in order.
Namely, the original to be translated is divided into the morphemes by the morphological analyzer 32. Thereafter, the translation is carried out without exception by the syntactic analyzer 33 and afterward, which are deep-level analytical units.
Regarding the case in which the original is the typical sentence and the translation result can be decided based on only the simple corresponding relationship with the original, the aforementioned conventional translation processing results in overspecialization obviously.
In other words, since the length of the original subjected to analytical processing by a deeper-level analytical unit is little shortened, there is a possibility that erroneous translation, which is substantially proportional to the length of the original, may occur, or processing time required for translation is not reduced.
In accordance with the explosion in the widespread use of the Internet, the automatic translator has been often used in browsing E-mail or home page. In such a case, the original whose translation result can be decided based on only the simple corresponding relationship is frequently included as a given translation object. To name a representative example, there is a character string indicative of date and time, and a day of the week as in “Thu, 09 Jul. 1988 07:49:30-0700.”
A plurality of patterns can be present in such a character string, and they are stereotyped and have strong regularity. More specifically, such character string is nothing but a meaningless list of words, which are equivalent to nouns, and has no structure such as a phase and a clause as in the normal sentence.
It is obvious overspecialization to execute each processing of the syntactic analyzer 33, semantic analyzer 34, and conceptual structure converter 35 illustrate in FIG. 1 when the above-mentioned character string is inputted. For this reason, there is always possibility that erroneous analysis will occur, and this is unfavorable in view of the translation speed.
While, Japanese Patent Unexamined Publication No. 64-31269 discloses a translation apparatus, which comprises a translated word specifying memory that stores a word specified by an operator and its translation, for generating a translated sentence using a specific translated word corresponding to the word of the original, which is stored in the translated word specifying memory by referring to the translated word specifying memory at a translation executing time.
However, the translation apparatus disclosed in the above publication shows translation processing, which is based on word-to-word simple correspondence and provides no such processing that detects a string of predetermined morphemes (generally, corresponding to a plurality of words in the original) from the sequence of morphemes, and describes a user interface having the necessity for an operator to carry out translated-word registration processing beforehand.